Monday, October 31, 2016

The AFL has now released its fixture
for 2017, and with its release comes the annual media evaluation of
which clubs ‘won’ and ‘lost’ from the scheduling. For some of the press the focus
was on who received or missed out on the ‘prime time’ Friday night slots
(summary: the Bulldogs and Swans won, Richmond and Fremantle lost). And the
other main point of focus is which clubs got the easiest and hardest draws, and
will therefore be helped or hindered most by the AFL playing 22 rounds with 18
teams.

This is the fifth year over
at ‘The Wooden Finger’ that I have tried to answer the question: which AFL club
got the easiest fixture next year? For anyone who is interested, and doesn’t
feel like digging through the archives, these were the results:

Year

Easiest

Next Easiest

Hardest

Next Hardest

2016

Gold
Coast

Geelong

North
Melbourne

Adelaide

2015

West
Coast

Melbourne

Western
Bulldogs

Port
Adelaide

Geelong

Hawthorn

2014

Western
Bulldogs

Richmond

GWS

Essendon

Brisbane

2013

Melbourne

Brisbane

North
Melbourne

Collingwood

Western
Bulldogs

2012

Adelaide

North
Melbourne

Collingwood

Western
Bulldogs

Okay, let’s get into it: which
AFL club got the easiest AFL fixture in 2017? First I’m going to go through my
method for determining who I think has the easiest fixture, and who that says
got the luck of the draw in 2017. Then I’m going to compare my results with
those from a few other methods.

The WF Method

So here’s my method: I rate a
club’s fixture by summing up over every match the ranking points of its
opponents as determined by my end-of-season
AFL Power Rankings, while adjusting for net
home ground advantage. For example, a Victorian club that plays host
to a non-Victorian club with 10 ranking points will get +2 points in terms of
how easy the match is expected to be for them: -10 points in terms of the
expected strength of the opponent, but +12 points for the expected home ground
advantage.[1]

This means the rating for
each club’s fixture is in effect the result of three components:

Effect
of which clubs your club plays twice: This is the collective
strength of the opponents that each club plays twice. A higher rating for this
component means that you have easier opponents in your return bouts.

Net
home ground advantage: This is the net effect of the adjustments for
home ground advantage across the season. Not playing your home matches
interstate helps out here (hello Western Bulldogs), as does playing clubs from
out-of-town.

There has been a bit
of debate here about that last point. Some people think that rating
the difficulty of a fixture should remove the effect of not playing your own
club, and I would concede that fans usually exclude this effect when thinking
about how difficult their fixture is. On a strict interpretation of how
difficult a fixture is though I’d say it should be included. In the results below
I show what the results are with and without this effect.

The Results

Using the above method
here’s my ratings of the easiness/difficulty of each AFL club’s fixture in 2017,
ranked from easiest to hardest:

The middle six clubs are quite variable on this
component. St. Kilda has return matches against two top clubs including last
year’s minor premier Sydney, but North Melbourne’s only strong return opponent is
the Western Bulldogs.

The top six clubs on the ladder tend to have
the toughest sets of return matches. The exception is Adelaide as it has return
matches against two strong clubs instead of three.

Net
home ground advantage: Generally this component doesn’t make a huge
amount of difference, as home matches and away matches even out. Carlton gets
the rawest deal, as it has to travel interstate six times while only having
four matches against non-Victorian clubs at home, two of which are against the
Sydney clubs. Richmond also does relatively badly as it has six interstate
trips and a trip to Geelong. Adelaide does relatively well because for two of
its interstate trips its opponents have no or little advantage – North
Melbourne in Tasmania, and Melbourne in Darwin.

Effect
of not playing own club: Obviously stronger clubs do better on
this component. But the main point here is how this component affects the
assessment of how difficult a club’s fixture is. Without it weak clubs such as
Brisbane, Gold Coast, and Essendon are assessed as having the most favourable
fixtures, as is the intention under the AFL’s ‘weighted rule’. But with it
Adelaide is assessed as having the most favourable fixture. The Crows, unlike
those other clubs, have to play one less top club: the Crows themselves.

In summary then, the Adelaide Crows – with a relatively
favourable fixture for a strong club, and a couple of interstate trips where
their opponents have little home ground advantage – is considered here to have
the easiest fixture in 2017. North Melbourne and Port Adelaide have relatively
favourable fixtures for mid-range clubs, and their fixtures are rated as the
next easiest.

As you would have seen near
the start of this post Adelaide and North Melbourne were considered to have
difficult fixtures in 2016. Is the AFL making it up to these clubs this year?
Also we seem to have come full circle from my first-ever
annual assessment, which was for the 2012 fixture,
where Adelaide and North Melbourne were rated as having the easiest fixtures
for that year.

At the other end for 2017 Hawthorn
is rated as having the hardest fixture, having to front up twice against three
of the top four highest-ranked sides. In terms of clubs they play twice the
fixtures of Geelong and GWS are considered just as hard, but the Cats and
Giants are rated as better sides than the Hawks.

Now let’s look at how these
results compare to those of other methods of rating the fixture.

Rohan Connolly’s method for
rating each club’s fixture has four components:

which clubs they play twice, based on ladder
position (after finals)

number of road trips, including short and
longer hauls;

number of matches where the club plays another
club from interstate; and

the number of consecutive six-day breaks.

The second and third
components together essentially form a version of net home ground advantage.
The fourth component – six-day breaks – isn’t considered in my method, but it
doesn’t make that much difference to Connolly’s rankings.

The main difference from my
method is that Connolly’s method doesn’t include the effect of not playing your
own club. Hence his rankings of clubs look similar to what the AFL is trying to
achieve through its ‘weighted rule’ – except that, as noted above, Adelaide,
North Melbourne, and Port Adelaide have relatively favourable draws given their
groupings, and St. Kilda and Fremantle have relatively unfavourable draws. Essendon
is rated as having the easiest fixture under his method.

Another difference from my
method is that Connolly uses the ladder position to determine the strength of
clubs. Ladder positions are arguably a little misleading when a club catches
fire in the finals (hello
again Western Bulldogs) or it had a favourable fixture the previous season,
but the more important point is that it may not always be a good indicator of
the gaps between clubs. For example by my rankings seventh-placed West Coast was
closer in quality to most of the preliminary finalists than it was to
eighth-placed North Melbourne, and I don’t think I would be alone in that
assessment. Ladder positions are a lot easier to explain in a major newspaper
though.

Connolly also assigns a higher
penalty for road trips than he assigns an advantage for playing an interstate club
at home. This raises the difficulty of the fixture for non-Victorian clubs
under his measure (which perhaps doesn’t feel unreasonable if you are flying from
and to Perth every other week), whereas under my method these types of matches broadly even out.

The Hurling People Now method only
uses a ‘strength of schedule’ measure, with no reference to home ground
advantage (or breaks). Therefore Carlton and Richmond, which have bad net home
ground advantages in my method, do better in theirs. This site rates North Melbourne
as having the easiest fixture in 2017, who I rated as having an easy fixture as
well.

HPN’s post makes the important
point that the strength of a fixture changes throughout the year, as clubs turn
out to be stronger or weaker than initially thought. I feel like I’ve made this
point before too, but cannot for the life of me remember where. Let’s just say
I’ve already thought of it and not look further for proof.

The Matter of Stats method is
similar to mine, but it is more precise about the home ground advantages. For
example, Fremantle is rated as having more of a disadvantage than West Coast
when it plays at the M.C.G., whereas in my system there is no difference
between them and the other non-Victorian clubs – Sydney clubs aside – when they
travel to Melbourne. Despite these differences this site also rates Adelaide as
having the easiest fixture in 2017.

But Does The Fixture Matter?

Back in my first annual
assessment of the AFL fixture in 2012 I said that one shouldn’t blame the
fixture if your club is doing badly. Matter of Stats and Hurling People Now both
estimate that the difference between the easiest fixture and hardest fixture is
only about one win. And Rohan Connolly’s headline even noted that, based on
past assessments, a tough fixture generally didn’t mean ‘doom and gloom’.

So it can make the
difference between say, finishing fourth or fifth (or finishing fourth or
seventh if things are close). But you are not becoming a top club through a
favourable fixture. Perhaps then clubs should indeed be more concerned about
how many ‘prime time’ matches they have when the fixture is released.

[1]I’ve actually adjusted
each club’s ranking points a little so the sum of fixture difficulty across the
league is zero.

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Merchandise are a trio from Tampa,
Florida (who have actually topped a WF5
post here before) but they sound more like gloomy British post-punk,
and on this track, like British new wave. The synth-hook makes it; it’s
certainly not singer Carson Cox murmuring the lyrics. I looked
the lyrics up: they’re a bit of a downer actually (‘I came
back to my home, it was slashed and torn’ … ‘I spent 39 years collecting the
seeds / But they all died …’). They seem to me like they’re about being at the
end of a relationship and feeling like your efforts are all now for nothing. Almost
they suggest the narrator has jumped realities – ‘went looking for a lover but
she was never born’ – but at the least that he feels like a stranger in the
place he finds himself in.

The band even dresses
in dark tones – I have trouble reconciling all of this with
the Florida sun. If I just think of Merchandise and their music as being from
northern England they make much more sense. But then so too did dark-jacketed
San Franciscans Black
Rebel Motorcycle Club; sometimes dirt and dinginess are just a state
of mind.

Scottish alt-rock stalwarts
Teenage Fanclub recently released their tenth album: a stage of their careers
that ‘The
Ringer’ called ‘too old to be ascendant, too young to come back
into style or resign themselves to the nostalgia circuit’. (The article put
Wilco into the same category.) It’s worth a listen, even if like me you haven’t
heard that much of their past work.

The opening track, ‘I’m In
Love’, is a real winner. Like the #1 song on this month’s list I didn’t know
beforehand this was the single off the album, but it immediately stood out to
me. The title, lyrics, simple guitar chords, and harmonies give it a mid-to-late
‘60s pop-rock feel. As has been noted elsewhere
the chorus – ‘I’m in love, with your love’ – is a bit ambiguous about the
singer’s feelings: is he in love with another person, or just the feeling of love
itself? Regardless it’s a bright, catchy tune that makes the band sound twenty
years younger, as if this style of music was just beginning rather than having
come from the now-distant past.

Some months ago I was watching
the ABC Kids Channel with my daughter and in between shows there was this
somewhat baffling, somewhat charming two-minute animated segment. It featured
two blocks with funny faces sitting on a bench singing a pretty good song
actually about how different they were. ‘We are different / we are different,’
went the chorus, ‘as you can clearly see / A most unlikely pair we are / A most
unlikely pair are we’. One of the blocks was a weird-looking fellow that sang
in a high voice, while the other was more of a ‘hipster’ block in a hat and
glasses who delivered his lines in a rap-like, conversationalist tone. This
allowed the song to carry forward through snippets of exchange such as these:

BLOCK 1: ‘In my spare time I
play hide-and-seek’

BLOCK 2: ‘While I like to
teach rubber ducks how to squeak’

BLOCK 1: ‘You teach them to
squeak?’

BLOCK 2: ‘Yep’

BLOCK 1: ‘That’s unique’

BLOCK 2: ‘Yeah, I try to give
them tips on their squeaking technique’

Big Block SingSong is
largely the creation of two
Canadians, animator Warren Brown and composer Adam Goddard. Each episode features a
unique character and tune, although the voices of the characters are similar
across episodes. Over the past several weeks my daughter and I have had a few
binge-watching sessions through the ABC’s
iview site:
‘More! More!’ my daughter says, pointing at the screen, and then I click on
another episode. I can’t tell you what her favourites are, but I personally
like ‘Wilderness’ (about a block who lives in the forest), ‘Technology’
(Kraftwerk or Devo if fronted by singing blocks), ‘Brave’ (Queen if backed by
singing blocks), and the rock ‘n’ roll ‘Princess’ (one of the few episodes with
a female protagonist). But they’re all great – if you have a young one I highly
recommend getting him or her hooked on them.

What does ’33 GOD’ mean? The
song goes for 3:33 (3 minutes and 33 seconds), but that meaning could have been
added at the end rather than part of its core. Each line seems barely related
to the one before it, apart from the last verse which seems to be about the
singer staying over at someone’s apartment for the night. Vernon auto-tunes the
shit out of his voice, adding to the sense that he is being intentionally
oblique.

But it works. As the
website Pretty
Much Amazing put
it there’s ‘an air of cross-pollination to it … instruments clash with
unprecedented force. On the other hand, you can imagine a stripped down version
with untouched vocals working on the strength of the melodies.’ Indeed, the
sounds do work together. And Vernon’s voice, distorted as it is, still sounds
like distinctly his own. It’s enough to keep it spiralling into
pretentiousness, despite the hipster
cassette-listening parties that marked the album’s release.

The third track from Cymbals
Eat Guitars’ latest album, ‘Wish’ makes the band sound like the lounge act
evoked by the album cover, only way better. In making the album they looked to musicians
such as Bruce Springsteen and The Cure for inspiration. But I didn’t think
of either of those when I first heard this, I actually thought of this early-‘80s
band my Dad used to play, called Mink Deville. Mink
Deville’s ‘hits’ included songs called ‘Italian
Shoes’ and ‘Spanish
Stroll’: they were a bit bluesy, a bit cabaret, a bit punk, and this track
is all of those things in some degree.

The saxophone may give it a
lounge sound, but singer Joseph D’Agostino’s hoarse delivery gives the song an
urgent edge. It seems to be basically about longing – ‘I wish that I told you’ –
but the lyrics are more complicated than that: ‘An inch ahead of the event horizon
…’ goes the opening line for example. And there’s a line ‘Can we shut the
lights please?’ which may be part of the track, or just studio chatter. It’s a
fun little stomp and a great introduction for me to this band.

Instead
the Bulldogs had easily their best four weeks of the season, improving by
between two and three goals per match in the rankings after going backwards over
the preceding two months. Their level of performance isn’t unprecedented, not
even in the past year – the Bulldogs’ opponents in the Grand Final, the Sydney
Swans, performed at a similar standard over their four matches up to the end of
the preliminary final. But the Bulldogs definitely performed at a much higher
level right when it mattered most than they had shown over the season up to
that point.

Why?
Was it because that the Bulldogs re-gained some of their best players for the
finals series? I initially thought this couldn’t be the whole explanation, and
that some of their players must have played a lot better during the finals. But
it’s not clear that, on average, their players did improve. Looking over each
player’s average SuperCoach scores before and during the finals some
players such as Clay Smith, Tom Boyd, and Liam Picken did seem to clearly play
a lot better. However, other players such as recently-recalled pair Jake
Stringer and Easton Wood, and Matthew Boyd, seemed to play worse, even if it
wasn’t noticed that much while their team kept on winning. Perhaps then it was
in large part due to the players that returned – Wood and Stringer, but in
particular Jack Macrae, Jordan Roughead, and Tom Liberatore – and that these
players were a lot better than the players that replaced them during the final
weeks of the home-and-away season.

Still
that to me doesn’t seem to quite nail the explanation. Maybe it was that the
Bulldogs’ opponents under-performed during the finals? I don’t subscribe to
views such as it was the Bulldogs’ ‘spirit’ that got them through. Or if it was
their ‘spirit’, what specifically was it that they did better as a result? I
reckon there’s an interesting ‘study’ to be done by someone as to how the
Bulldogs suddenly turned into a side that could knock out four teams that had
won 16 or more matches in consecutive weeks.

It’s
probably the most unlikely premiership win in my lifetime. I wouldn’t say it’s the
most unlikely there has ever been – the Bulldogs had certainly shown more than
the Fitzroy team that
came from the ‘bottom’ to win it all in 1916. Nevertheless the Bulldogs became
the first club to win four straight finals to take out the flag. [Correction: Adelaide did it too, in 1997, but they didn't need to.]

Monday, September 19, 2016

M.I.A’s latest album ‘AIM’ –
thought to perhaps be her last – has been well-received by some, but
not by others.
‘Freedun’ works pretty well though. It has a smooth, relaxing sound, but still
has some heavy beats to keep it moving along. The chorus is sung by ZAYN who,
since I’m not much of a boy band or ‘The X-Factor’ fan, I’ve literally just learned
as I’m writing this that he used to be in One Direction. (I’ve also literally just
learned as I’m writing this that One Direction used to be on ‘The X-Factor’.) Given
the rest of the album and M.I.A.’s career in general it seems like there might
be some political themes on this track, but it’s actually more about her
bragging than anything else, particularly the second verse (e.g. ‘Dinosaurs
died out and I’m still strong’). Still, give me a nice tune and I don’t mind
you telling me how great you are.

4.Skeleton Tree: album – Nick
Cave

This is the album following the
death of Cave’s son Arthur, who
fell off a cliff after taking LSD last year. Not that this tragic event has
likely changed the album much: Nick Cave’s albums are well-known for being dark
affairs, and he has said that he
wrote most of the lyrics before Arthur’s death. Lines like ‘You fell from
the sky, crash landed in a field near the river Adur’ – the first line on the
album – and ‘I called out, I called out, right across the sea’ from the closing
title track are possibly coincidental in their imagery then. And like David
Bowie with ‘Blackstar’ Nick Cave’s work is too multi-faceted to be simply reduced
to alluding to death.

Reviewers have generally been
effusive in
their praise of the album so far, and it looks like it may be up there with
‘Blackstar’ (and Radiohead, always Radiohead) on critics’ end-of-year ‘best
of’ lists. It hasn’t quite taken a hold of me yet. My favourite song is
definitely ‘Distant Sky’, which is a duet with Danish soprano Else Torp. Otherwise it’s
just another solid Nick Cave album to me so far. Maybe its power will be
revealed with more time, or maybe Cave’s music has always been so powerful that
even the most personally harrowing of circumstances doesn’t do much to affect
it.

3.Sunlit Youth: album – Local Natives

Now this album has been a
pleasant find. Local Natives are an LA indie band who have now released three
albums, and their latest – ‘Sunlit Youth’ – doesn’t really have a bad track on
it. Yeasayer is the most obvious comparison to me, though opening track ‘Villainy’
reminds me, at least vocally, of the Blue Nile (as does the album cover). If
you don’t know what I’m talking about that in itself tells you what corner of
the music world Local Natives occupy – pop/rock that its fans will love but won’t
be troubling the top of the charts any time soon. Other tracks I like, making
it hard to pick just one here, are ‘Fountains of Youth’, ‘Coins’, and ‘Dark
Days’, with the Cardigans’ Nina Persson.

2.Power Over Men – Jamie T

The new single from South
London’s Jamie T wouldn’t be out of place playing in an Austin Powers movie,
making it perhaps one of the more conventional tracks from his excellent album
‘Trick’. But that also means that it is a lot of fun. The track seems to be simply
about one of those good-looking women that makes men weak at the knees, just
with Jamie T’s more complex vocabulary – the phrase ‘she was never academic’
could be a substitute for ‘dumb blonde’.

The story gets a little more
interesting when Jamie suggests that this woman’s power not only makes men
drool, but also makes them engage in a bit of under-handed competition to win
her affections: ‘She walked in, I could say she looked good, I could she’s just
a friend / But that would just be throwing you off the scent … She’s under my
skin’. Then Jamie introduces a ‘twist’, which seems to just be the standard
plot device that this femme fatale will never fall in love – ‘she can never
really kiss’ – although the cause for this, ‘there’s never remiss’, doesn’t
quite make sense to me. She never has a ‘lack
of attention’? Did he just use the word ‘remiss’ because it
sounded good? I’m a little confused.

Then if you watch the video
clip the phrase ‘power over men’ takes on a further meaning …

1.Shut Up And Kiss Me – Angel
OlsenForcefulness and submission –
many relationships have both, and they both seem to be present in this strident
track from US singer-songwriter Angel Olsen. In part her voice is desperate:
‘This heart still beats for you’ she implores her lover, ‘I’m not going
anywhere’. In part she’s damn well up for a fight: ‘I ain’t giving up tonight …
Tell me what you think / And don’t delay’. Both sides collide in the chorus, in
Olsen yelling ‘Shut up kiss me hold me tight!’ which she delivers in a way that
you can’t tell who is grabbing who. She actually sounds to me a little like the
singer from 1980s’ US band The Motels
(Martha Davis) in this song.

The title of Olsen’s new
album is ‘MY WOMAN’, in capitals. Is that meant to contain forcefulness and
submission also? (I’m your woman, but I’m also MY WOMAN.) Anyway in a month
filled with notable new releases (Cave, M.I.A., Wilco, Teenage Fanclub,
Bastille, Okkervil River) Olsen’s and Jamie T’s albums are the two that sit
highest on my ‘buy list’.